The (Quite Literally) Phantom Thief
by Ichthyophobia
Summary: Kuroba Kaito was looking for a magic gem, but not this one. It's handy. Until it's not. (Done for the Supernatural theme contest at Poirot Cafe Forums. No pairings.)


**A.N.: My entry for the Supernatural themed contest at the Poirot Cafe Forums. I ended up writing this in less than 24 hours after the previous two ideas proved too big for the word limit. Enjoy!**

* * *

Kaitou Kid, as everyone knows, does magic.

Kuroba Kaito, as significantly fewer people know, also does magic.

But not _this_ kind.

The gem in his hands is much lighter than it should be. That's okay – he chalks it up to the setting. The Indicolite Eye has only been in its current setting since the eighties, and the necklace is tacky and probably at least partly plastic. He slides it into his pocket and makes a run for it, leapfrogging over Nakamori's assistant with a laugh. His escape route is clear, thanks to Jii and a few knockout gas capsules down the stairs, and he makes it to the roof without trouble. No detectives tonight, so no sense in waiting around for the dramatic confrontation. He snaps his hang glider open and launches off the roof.

It's the worst possible place for something to go unexpectedly wrong.

So of course, it does.

He hits a gust of wind, an updraft from one of the shorter buildings far below. It sends the glider into an unexpected spin, and Kaito throws his weight into straightening out.

Except Kuroba Kaito is now much lighter than he should be, too.

He shrieks (which he will deny later) as the glider fails to respond. Without his normal weight, he can't control the tilt, and without the tilt he can't control anything. He spirals down for a moment longer, picking up speed, before he hits another updraft, and straightens out.

Straight into the glass wall of a skyscraper.

He braces himself for the impact, mind racing – if he breaks the glass he needs to tuck and roll, if he _doesn't_ break the glass he needs to catch a handhold, he can't control the angle and if he hits at the wrong angle his neck snaps and he's dead. He tries, one more time, to throw his weight into controlling the glider. It fails. He sees his own terrified reflection like a snapshot, like time is slowing to a crawl.

Then he finds himself on the other side of the glass.

He tucks and rolls, pulling his hands and face inwards to protect them from the shards. He hits the ground and his glider collapses. He can feel the Indicolite Eye pressing against his hammering chest, surprisingly cold through the layers of fabric, as he thumps to a stop against a cubicle wall.

There's no glass on the ground.

Kaito stands, slowly. The window is intact, despite the fact that he just flew through it. He pauses, and pinches himself, just in case the impact wouldn't have woken him up and this really is a dream. It isn't a dream.

What the _heck_.

But Kaito, as Kaitou Kid, is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and since he's just been granted a miraculous escape, he sees no reason not to _escape_.

Nakamori will be here before long, after all.  
(Nakamori Ginzo, Kaito would be glad to know, is so impressed with Kid's apparent escape trick that he curses for a solid ten minutes. Not quite a record. Akiyama wins the betting pool.)

* * *

This magic, whatever it is, seems to have a mind of its own.

Kaito wakes up in the middle of the night feeling suffocated. It may be a dream, but the feeling goes away when he pulls his head out of the pillow. It's not a dream, in the morning, when he wakes up with feathers in his mouth and an arm through his mattress. He jumps out of bed like he's been burned.

The floor is solid. He checks first. The walls are solid, and he leans against one to pull his uniform on – he's overslept, which is usual for heist nights, and he'll be late if he doesn't get moving. The doorknob stays solid when he goes into the bathroom to wash his face. The mirror greets him, cheerfully and completely blank.

He doesn't have a reflection.

He doesn't scream, but it's a near thing. He flickers into view a moment later, poker face utterly shattered with a wide-eyed look of panic.

Something is very wrong here, he decides belatedly.

Any thought of rushing to get to class on time is lost, and he spends the next few minutes very carefully cataloging what's going wrong. He's not dropping things, but if he leans on the sink he'll fall through if he isn't careful. His reflection flickers out again when he puts down his comb, and he slowly appears once more when he picks up the toothbrush. He brushes his teeth while translucent, then puts his hand through the door just to see if he can. He weighs himself – if he concentrates, he can be his normal weight, but otherwise the scale registers nothing.

Before long, he gets the hang of it – _it_ being the ability to stay visible and not fall through objects, two skills that until today he considered himself a master of. Good enough. He heads to school.

And if he makes it there almost on time because he walked through the fence instead of going around to the gate, nobody's around to see.

* * *

Jii isn't as enthusiastic about Kaito's new skills as Kaito is. Jii's worried. Jii's always worried, but this time especially. Not being able to steer the glider is going to be a problem, and it's not one Jii can fix. Kaito assures him they'll figure something out, then puts his hand through the pool table by accident.

His hand closes around one of the balls inside, and pulls out the seven-ball, straight through the felt without leaving a mark. Jii gapes a bit, and Kaito masks his shock with poker face. That hadn't happened before.

But it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities now that it has.

They can't run a proper heist right now. No time to write the warning note, for one thing, and they haven't picked the next target either. But Kaito can't wait until they do to try it out, and nightfall finds them in a museum, Jii disguised and Kaito invisible and flickering. They've run a heist here before, so no need to scout it again. Kaito picks a gem at random from the case, then plunges his hand through the glass.

The gem flickers invisible in his grip, and he pulls it out. It's intact, and when he opens his hand the sapphire gleams and sparkles, apparently in thin air. Kaito puts his hand through the glass again, and puts it back.

...Well then.

If Jii finds Kaito's grin worrying, he keeps it to himself.

* * *

They start planning a new heist, accounting for Kaito's new abilities, but they don't get far before things get worrying. As it gets easier for Kaito to be invisible, it gets harder for him to show up, and as he puts his hands through doors and walls and glass he starts to slip through them by accident. He can still control it, if he tries, but it's getting harder by the day.

This is real magic, so Jii doesn't know much about it. Kaito knows even less.

Luckily, though, he knows someone who does.

The Indicolite Eye is heavy in his pocket as he heads to school on Thursday, weighing what seems to be a hundred times what it did when he first picked it up. He's almost positive the thing is the source of this magic; the timing leaves pretty much no other option. Hopefully he'll get an answer out of Akako without the need for an embarrassing bribe.

Akako watches him all morning, her eyes flickering to the pocket with the gem. He wonders if she can sense it or something, but worries more that Hakuba will notice her looking. Kaito's not sure how he'd play it off if Hakuba found it.

And speaking of Hakuba... his trap doesn't go off until a few minutes before lunch. Hakuba has been quiet today, and it takes him that long to raise his hand and hit the trigger. Something goes off with a bang and a clatter, and suddenly Hakuba, Hakuba's notes, and Hakuba's desk are covered in water-soluble paint and rainbow glitter.

(It doesn't get anywhere besides Hakuba. Kaito is particularly proud of that one.)

Hakuba is sent to the washroom to clean himself up, and the teacher lets them out early for lunch. Operation talk-without-Hakuba is a go, and Kaito takes the opportunity to sidle up to Akako and pull the gem out.

"Is this magic?" he asked bluntly.

"You are, as ever, correct," purrs Akako. "I'm surprised you guessed, without doves exploding out of it. It's _real_ magic, after all. I know you don't know anything about that."

Kaito ignores the jab. "What does it do?"

"It's a blessing," she said. "It grants power to the holder."

"Right." He nods, and slips the gem back into his pocket. He knows that already. "Do you know how to control it?"

...And _that_ was the wrong question, because she grins like a snake. "Why, Kuroba-kun! Are you saying you can't even figure out such a _basic_ spell? It's blatantly obvious."

He forces himself not to rise to the bait, and just scowls at her.

"I mean, really. Of course you can't control it." She waves a hand dismissively. "Not when you only have _half_."

He has questions about that. But those will have to wait, because Hakuba chooses that moment to walk back in, damp and still sort of sparkly. Kaito cuts his losses and ends the conversation.

* * *

Jii can always be counted on for research. They'd originally chosen the Indicolite Eye for the large, dark inclusion in the center that gave the gem its name and the blue-black pleochroism, but its reputation certainly hadn't hurt. It didn't have a reputation as being cursed, but it didn't have a spotless one either – a few of the latest owners had fallen prey to fatal accidents or disappeared shortly after acquiring it. Only for the past thirty years or so, though. Before that, oddly enough, it had a reputation for bringing _good_ luck.

It hadn't been cut since it was originally mined, so there wasn't another half. So much for that theory.

Jii is explaining the history in detail, when Kaito suddenly falls through the barstool, and turns invisible with embarrassment. It takes two hours for Kaito to turn visible again, and even then he's a bit translucent around the edges.

They decide to postpone the heist.

* * *

It gets worse, as time goes by, and Kaito thinks back to the past few owners. Fatal accidents, he can see. Falling through guardrails and being invisible to oncoming cars are both excellent ways to die. But if he's careful, and he knows what's going on, he can avoid those.

What worries him more is the owners who just _disappeared._

He can't keep himself visible for more than a few hours at a stretch, now. It makes school difficult, because the teacher thinks he's sneaking out of class, and can't figure out how. His hands fall through his desk and he has to concentrate on staying in his seat.

It scares him, and he swallows his pride enough to ask Akako another question.

"What's the difference," he asks, "between a blessing and a curse?"

"There is no difference," she answers.

Kaito goes home early, feeling sick, and does not come back the next day.

* * *

Kaito does his own research, running parallel to what Jii does. Jii's already established that none of the other fragments of indicolite were made into jewelry, so that's not the missing half. Kaito's not sure she was talking about another half of the gem.

She might have been talking about a second half to the _spell_.

He looks into the jewel's bad reputation, and its former good one, and when, exactly, it changed. It seems to have been about the time when the jewel was placed into its current setting, back in the eighties. (He's changed his mind about that setting feeling plastic – the jewel now weighs as much as three bricks on a fine gold chain.) If the jewel was upset about the ugly setting (don't laugh, magic jewel, who knows) then that could account for it. Maybe the previous setting had held the other half of the spell?

If so, he is dead – the old setting wouldn't have been kept. Probably destroyed. He doesn't know if that would break the spell, and he has no way of finding out. He looks up the old setting, just in case.

He finds a single picture of the necklace as it had used to be, and realizes. It isn't the setting.

It's the second gem.

The necklace had displayed two gems, the Indicolite Eye and a second, smaller one, by Kaito's guess no larger than his thumbnail, that hung beneath it like a swinging teardrop. The little gem was a deep, almost aquatic green, that contrasted nicely with the deep blue of the indicolite above it. A striking arrangement, and Kaito can't fathom why the owner'd broken the two apart.

Unless, of course, he'd sold them separately, because he needed the money.

Kaito checks.

Yep.

He passes the information on to Jii, who immediately switches research tracks. Unfortunately, a small green gem with a vitreous shine describes any number of minerals, and since it had been dwarfed by the much more striking Indicolite Eye, not much attention had been paid to it in the records.

He's able to narrow down the field, though. The gem would've been sold on its own, probably lacking even a chain, and it would've gone out through the same seller or auction house that the indicolite eye had, probably within the same year.

Which narrowed it down to about... two hundred targets.

It's a good thing stealing is easy, Kaito thinks, because he's going to be doing a lot of it.

* * *

They try to come up with heist notices for the first few jewels. The discussion is cut short when Kaito falls through his chair and can't turn solid again. No heist notices, Jii declares. They need to end this _now_. Kaito agrees, but insists on still wearing the Kid outfit. Even if he doesn't need half his gadgets and can't even use the other half, he wants to have them on hand.

The first heist, in the penthouse suite of a high rise building, was the kind of place Kaito would've loved to run a normal heist. The wide balcony was a perfect launching platform for the glider. Maybe he'll come back, he thinks. This owner has quite a collection of gemstones. He's in and out in less than fifteen minutes.

They're too used to heists taking weeks to plan and days to execute, Kaito realizes. Like this, he can run multiple heists per day. He wonders how many he can do in one night.

The answer turns out to be ten, before Jii starts nodding off at the wheel. Kaito, high on adrenaline, could probably keep going. He plays with the gems in his hand, watching them sparkle beneath the moonlight, and wonders how he'll know when he has the right one.

He compares the gems to the one in the picture, one by one. Not the right sparkle, slightly too large, wrong shade of green. Small speckled inclusions disqualify a few more, then the last one turns out to be a glass doublet. Kaito leaves them in a pile in the Kid room and goes to bed.

(He wakes up, two hours later, on the lowest floor of the house, sinking slowly into the foundation. He tries not to scream.)

* * *

Most of their targets, thankfully, are in Tokyo. There are a couple in smaller cities, four in Osaka, and two in Kyoto. A small handful resides overseas, and Kaito desperately hopes that none of those are the one he needs. He'll deal with those when he gets to it; for now, they're going for the easy targets.

Kaito calls himself in sick from school. They research during the day, and steal at night, averaging between twelve to fourteen daily. None of them yet have been quite right.

Meanwhile, Kaito gets worse.

He's invisible almost all the time now, and can't turn all the way back. The best he can do is translucency, and Jii has managed to stop flinching every time he sees it. He stands, because he can keep from falling through floors, but not chairs or couches. But if he stops paying attention his feet will start sinking into the floorboards, and it won't be long, he thinks, before he ends up six feet under and alive down there.

He goes to Akako in desperation (her house is _creepy_ , and she is more so) to ask if she can break the spell. She can't. But she gives him a bit more insight. The two halves of the spell need to be reunited in order for the spell to stop.

When they are, it will stop _immediately._

He starts carrying the Indicolite Eye in his jacket pocket.

* * *

Nobody sees him as Kid, but the media is having a circus over the recent jewel thefts. A new task force is formed to investigate and take him down. Nakamori's not on it, and that's just plain unacceptable.

He leaves every stolen jewel so far in a box on Nakamori's desk, and stands back to watch the fireworks. Nakamori curses for a solid 15 minutes (betting pool winner: Hakuba!) then grumbles in child-unfriendly language for another two hours as forensics goes over the gems. They don't find anything; Kaito made sure of it. (Most of the gems are significantly cleaner than they were when he stole them. He considers himself a public service.) He included no note with the box, but Nakamori and his one-track mind figure it out anyway. The Kid task force works the case separately from the new one. Kaito personally thinks they do a much better job.

* * *

He's missed a solid week of school before Aoko comes to check on him. She's just been texting him, before, actually listening to his excuses about being contagious and not wanting her to catch it and therefore staying away. But he's got a weeks worth of schoolwork that she needs to deliver, and she's not being put off by his excuses any longer.

She never has bothered to knock.

It wouldn't be a problem if he was invisible when she bursts into the house, but he isn't. It's hard to type when he can't see his hands, so he's putting a great effort into being translucent, at least. His hands fall through the keyboard when the door bangs open and startles him.

Aoko doesn't spot him until he turns around.

She stares. He has no way to play this one off – maybe he could pretend this is a trick? No, she would call that bluff, because if this were a trick it would be a projection, and then she'd want to see the real Kaito. He raises a hand to say hello, just out of habit, and when she takes a step back he takes a step forwards.

He's not paying attention to where he's going. He steps straight through the couch.

Aoko screams. The packet of notes and assignments she's holding thumps to the floor, and the door slams again as she darts back outside. He freezes, for a moment, then she opens the door a bit and peeks through.

She sees nothing. Kaito's turned invisible again. She leaves without a word.

He finds out the next day that Aoko, too, has now called in sick.

* * *

The Kaitou Kid task force, as Kaito learns from his frequent invisible visits to the police station, has figured out the pattern, connected it to the Indicolite Eye, and ranked the remaining jewels in Tokyo by likelihood of theft. He reads over the shoulder of Nakamori's assistant Akiyama-keiji just to see if they've found anything he missed.

Turns out, they have.

There's a collector based out of South Korea that Kid has stolen from before. The previous target was a trillion-cut ametrine the size of a man's fist, and Kaito remembers it for being ridiculously hard to research. The guy likes his privacy, and apparently after having one of his collection stolen that paranoia doubled. He went from difficult to research to _impossible_ , and Kaito had figured he wouldn't need to bother.

Turned out he should've bothered, because one of the gems Kaito skipped over before is pretty much _exactly_ what he's looking for. And one of the few groups that can still look into the contents of the collection is the task force.

Akiyama-keiji, in the spirit of paranoid task forces that have spent years dealing with extremely slippery thieves (he's trained them so well!) never leaves his computer unlocked and unattended, but Kaito can figure out the password from watching him type it a few times, so he presses the lock buttons on the keyboard every time Akiyama looks away, until he has the password memorized.

Invisibility is handy. He's going to miss it.

Akiyama eventually leaves, and Kaito takes over on the computer. The task force even has a super-high-resolution picture of the gem, good enough that he can match the tiny gaseous inclusions around the edge of the stone to those in the original picture. It's a near-perfect match, and just his luck, it's part of the man's Tokyo collection.

It's his next target.

* * *

Unfortunately, the task force figured out the same. Kaito might not have much respect for Nakamori in their usual game, but the man has a genuine skill for being where you don't want him, and when Jii drives past the heist building there are cop cars parked unobtrusively around the area. They're at exactly the intervals needed to have a substantial response without scaring away a criminal.

He shares a look with Jii – it won't be Nakamori's normal setup, where he can rely on the criminal showing up no matter how ostentatious he is about the police presence. This is going to be more like a mouse trap than the usual impenetrable safe – easy to get into, hard to get out of.

And if this is the correct stone – if this breaks the curse – getting _out_ will be the hard part.

Kaito considers leaving the Indicolite Eye in the car with Jii. But if the curse transfers to Jii, then they have to break it twice. Not worth the risk, especially if this turns out not to be the right stone. He takes it with him.

He recognizes most of the task force in disguise around the building. The "security guards" are two of the new transfers, and Akiyama is there, his ever-present clipboard helping him to pose as middle-manager working late. Some of the others are here as businessmen, peering out into the hallway over the tops of computer screens. He doesn't see Nakamori until he reaches the room where the gem is being kept to find a familiar-looking janitor mopping by the display case.

It's too good to resist. He circles around to one side, and whispers.

"You missed a spot."

Nakamori whirls, mop coming up in front of him like a sword. Kaito takes the opportunity to dart around and snatch the gem out of the display case behind his back.

...And despite _knowing_ that this was probably the correct gem, it hadn't quite sunk in what would happen if it was.

He stays intangible just long enough to pull his hand – and the gem – out of the display case. But it's like trying to move through molasses, and getting harder. His fingers clear the case just in time to avoid being chopped off.

A close call. He still has them, though.

He knows because he can _see_ them now.

He's still translucent, and getting less so by the second. But he doesn't really have time to think about that now, because Nakamori whirls back to face the display case and catches sight of the now-visible Kaitou Kid. Kaito ducks back just in time to avoid a solid swing with the mop.

The attack is accompanied by an angry bellow of decidedly non-PG language, and it brings the rest of the task force running. Kid ducks two more mop-swings, one of which knocks his hat off, before he has to dodge a textbook-perfect flying tackle from Akiyama. He ducks to avoid another officer, and Nakamori lands a solid hit to his chest (so _that's_ where Aoko got her swing from!) with the mop. He scoops up his hat and dashes for the door.

He leapfrogs over two more officers in the hallway, nearly snagging his cape on their heads when he forgets that it's not intangible anymore. He makes it to the stairway door to find out that they've locked it, so he dashes into a maze of office-cubicles to buy himself enough time to double back and pick it.

He gets to the roof to find Nakamori waiting for him.

...He supposes Nakamori was bound to think of roof-ambushes eventually, but he kind of wishes it wasn't _right now_. He dodges another mop swing (why does he still have that?), blinds the officers with a smoke bomb, and flips up onto the bulky air-conditioning unit. He flattens himself against the top for a moment to catch his breath.

He takes a look at his hand. He's still partially translucent, getting better. But he'll need to use his glider, and if there's any sudden weight shift like there was the last time, it could be a disaster. The curse is wearing off, though, just like Akako said it would, so if he can just stay here for a moment longer, maybe...

One of the officers spots his hat.

 _Dangit._

Kaito launches himself off the roof.

* * *

The gem in his hand is lighter than it should be, thinks Nakamori Ginzo, but as soon as he picks up the second item in the latest package-from-Kid the feeling goes away. It's long past time the Indicolite Eye was returned, but he knows he'll never get an explanation from Kid as to why he kept it for so long.

...Or maybe he will. There's a note in the bottom of the package, and he carefully smooths it out to read it.

 _Nakamori-keibu,_

 _It may be best to display these two beauties_ _together from now on. They missed each other._

 _Kaitou Kid._

 _P.S. My apologies for making you sound like a lunatic on your reports._

The little doodle looks contrite, at least.

Nakamori snorts, and sets the note aside for forensics. Kaitou Kid _clearly_ does not read his reports. Because if he did, he would know that "translucent Kaitou Kid put a hand straight through the glass after appearing from thin air" is _far_ from the weirdest thing the task force has ever had to put on official paperwork.

And he would know. He won that betting pool, after all.


End file.
